What Is True20?

True20 is an adventure roleplaying game in which you, the players, take on the roles of fictional heroes having thrilling adventures in an imagined environment. One player, the Narrator, takes on the job of creating that environment and the stories for the other players to take part in. Together, you create your own tales of action and adventure, like your favorite novels, movies, or video games. You don’t need any expensive computers or video game systems to take part though. You just need a few books, some friends, and plenty of imagination.

The best part about adventure roleplaying is you are in control of the action! Literally anything you can imagine is possible, because you control the story.

True20 is the latest in generations of adventure roleplaying games that have been around since the 1970s. How is it different? Well, True20 is…

Familiar!

Thanks to something called the Open Game License, True20 is based on the world’s most popular roleplaying game system, giving it many elements familiar to fans and players of that and other similar systems.

True20 has heroic roles to help define its characters, and six ability scores (Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma) to describe their capabilities. It uses skill ranks and heroic feats as well as saving throws. If these things sound familiar, you probably already know a great deal about how to play the game!

This familiarity lets you tap into a bigger audience of players. Even if they haven’t played True20 before, odds are they already know how! If roleplaying is new to you, that’s OK too. True20 gives you everything you need to get started in a rewarding and enjoyable hobby.

Fast!

Where True20 shines is in using the essential elements of adventure roleplaying, while streamlining them to make game-play fast and easy.

All the action is based around a single core mechanic: roll a twenty-sided die, add (or subtract) a modifier, and compare the result to a pre-determined difficulty number; that’s it! It serves as the basis for everything in the True20 system; no need for other dice or types of die rolls, no point counting or multiplying or dividing.

True20 even does away with point accounting: no keeping track of hit points, spell points, fatigue points, and so forth. True20 uses various conditions to describe exactly what’s happening in the game quickly and easily; so you can say your character is “bruised” or “staggered” rather than “down 11 hit points” or “exhausted” rather than “only having 4 fatigue points left.”

Fans who have played True20 say it runs as fast as an action-adventure story should, without the game rules getting in the way of the fun, which brings us to its most important quality…

Fun!

True20 is designed by adventure roleplayers for adventure roleplayers. It’s meant to be the most amount of fun with the least amount of work, offering flexibility and choice without bogging down in unnecessary detail or rules. It gives you the tools to have exciting adventures and then gets out of your way to let you do it.

To further enhance the fun you can have with True20, Green Ronin has partnered with other game publishers to present you with fantastic worlds of adventure to play in! The True20 Worlds of Adventure book presents five sample settings from a wide range of genres. The Damnation Decade campaign setting also includes a True20 rules appendix, plus third-party publishers support True20 settings for fantasy, cyberpunk, modern conspiracy horror, and more!

Getting Started

If this sounds like the RPG you’ve been waiting for, your first stop should be the True20 Adventure Roleplaying, Revised Edition rulebook. This is available as a softcover book and a handy PDF file. If you’d like to see more before you buy, take a look around this website for additional info. You’ll find several samples of the rulebook you can check out, and there’s also a True20 Quick Start Rules PDF you can download for free. These rules show you the basics of True20 and give you enough info to try it out with Death in Freeport, a free adventure you can also download from this site.